SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Kenneth Touchi rounds the corner and
hears that familiar rumbling. His dog breaks free, racing after a
400-pound bobsled skidding down Welch Avenue on this balmy January
afternoon.
Touchi and the barking Cyman have stumbled across the Armenian
bobsled team, whose road to the Olympics cuts through this sleepy,
middle-class San Jose neighborhood.
"They're crazy. We don't have any snow here," Touchi says.
"But I hope they win. They'll make our block look good."
Dan Janjigian and Yorgo Alexandrou won't be winning any medals
at the Winter Games. But simply competing at the Salt Lake City
Olympics will be triumph enough for these best buddies, whose
latest training run has nearly claimed the front bumper of a parked
car.
While the favored Swiss and German teams use custom-built sleds
and train virtually year-round on ice-covered tracks, Janjigian and
Alexandrou have a secondhand bobsled and do most of their workouts
on Welch Avenue.
"We were joking yesterday that maybe we'll bring the value of
houses up in this area," Janjigian says. "People will say they
want to live on that bobsled street."
Just as with many Olympians from smaller countries, practicing
is one of many challenges facing Janjigian and Alexandrou.
They interrupt training to do fund-raisers, such as the
$100-a-plate feast set for next week in a church hall. And there
was a matter of citizenship -- Alexandrou is of Greek heritage.
Janjigian, 29, who supports the Armenian bobsled team with
proceeds from his Web site design company, lost his original
brakeman -- Ara Bezdjian -- to a back injury.
He went to Armenia and recruited a 19-year-old weightlifting
champion, but his visa application was rejected after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks.
So Janjigian turned to his best friend, Alexandrou, whose first
run on a bobsled track nearly was his last.
Three weeks of Welch Avenue workouts had not prepared
Alexandrou, 29, for the 90-mph speed on an icy mile-long track.
Racers encounter five times the force of gravity, sucking the air
out of their lungs.
"It was so fast I almost didn't get into the sled. Then I was
hyperventilating. I was in shock for two hours after the race," he
says.
Alexandrou, an importer of Greek wine, soon became hooked -- and
the Armenian bobsled federation granted him residency status.
But they still had to qualify for the Olympics.
Their last real chance came in mid-December in Lake Placid,
N.Y., where Janjigian drove four hours to borrow a set of weights.
Janjigian and Alexandrou are thickly muscled, but their combined
weight is only about 400 pounds -- trim by bobsledding standards.
Racers are allowed to add weight to their sleds to make up the
difference.
They qualified on the last run of the competition, finishing
fifth -- ahead of such nations as Mexico, Trinidad and the Virgin
Islands.
It was vindication for Janjigian, whose three-year quest had
drained his bank account and tried his parents' patience.
"My father is one of those dads who has always been skeptical.
He is always like, 'What is the point?' He's always wanted me to
settle down," Janjigian says. "Now he's just so proud."
Janjigian began his Olympic odyssey when he met Greek bobsledder
John-Andrew Kambanis at a cousin's wedding. Kambanis, always
looking for new sledders, realized right away he had a good
prospect.
"I knew he had a good athletic background. And when you start a
team for a small country you have to have an entrepreneurial
spirit, and I saw that in Dan," says Kambanis, a Chicago-based
financial analyst.
Janjigian and Alexandrou won't be the first Olympic bobsledders
from Armenia, a mountainous country slightly larger than Maryland
that until 1994 contributed athletes to Soviet Union teams.
Joe Almasian and Ken Topalian finished 36th at the Lillehammer
Games, joining a roster of Armenian-American sports heroes that
includes tennis' Andre Agassi and former Miami Dolphins kicker Garo
Yepremian.
Almasian, who lives in Boston, competed in those 1994 Winter
Games with a sled rented from the American Samoan team.
"Being of Armenian heritage, it's always nice to see your
country represented," he says. "And I'd like to think we paved
some of that road and have given some inspiration to Dan."
Janjigian and Alexandrou lack the novelty of the Jamaican team
that inspired the movie "Cool Runnings," or the fame of sledders
such as Monaco's Prince Albert and former NFL star Herschel Walker.
But they're quite an attraction on Welch Avenue.
They've welded in-line skates onto an old sled, and set up
timers on the street. Drivers wave, children gawk and Janjigian's
94-year-old grandmother sometimes visits to cheer on her beloved
Armenian team.
The tanned sledders are practicing their start -- "Set ... ready
... one ... ahhh-huuh" -- as Touchi and Cyman pass by.
Touchi, 73, a retired mechanical engineer who grew up in Hawaii,
recognizes one part of the sled from his childhood.
"We had wheels like that, too," he says. "But they were on a
skate."